Weddingbee boards

I'll preface this with a disclaimer: Don't try this at home. I do not recommend pursuing the course of action that we did; we really got pretty lucky.

So, everyone knows that you have to take one of your wedding invitations to the post office and ask them to weigh it and tell you how much postage you'll need. Smart people do this at multiple post offices to be absolutely certain the invites will get where they're going, and not fall victim to a randomly vindictive employee who happens to be working that day and decides to, oh, I don't know, enforce a rule that no one ever does and spitefully hurl your carefully glued and folded creations right back at your front door.

We didn't do what smart people do.

FI and I, like everyone, are busy people and didn't have time to make it to the post office during business hours in the time between when we assembled our first invitation and when it was time to send them all off. We did run by the post office after-hours to use their scale ourselves. We found out how much our invitation weighed and ordered custom postage from Zazzle because I personally loved the look of a single, color-coordinated, thematically appropriate stamp, instead of a row of awkward Liberty Bell stamps or whatnot.

So when they were all finished, we stamped our invites with their lovely dahlia stamps, and we dumped the lot directly into the bin at the post office, again after-hours. I think it was like midnight. We felt triumphant.

Fast forward three days.

I come home from work to find a soft package on my doorstep. It's a neatly bundled package of exactly nineteen of our invitations, complete with a printout of USPS postage guidelines, in which some kind person has highlighted two sections. Point the first: that you're really supposed to go to the post office to mail letters in quantities greater than 10 so that they can tell you if you need to add more postage. Point the second: that since our envelope is greater than 6 1/8 inches on each side, it's considered a large envelope and is going to cost another 27 cents on top of our lovely dahlia stamp.

Nineteen of them, out of the 54 that we sent. Why? No rhyme or reason to which ones came back. By this point I'd gotten word from multiple locals who had received their invitations with no problem. The conclusion I came to was that some, perhaps slightly disgruntled, postal employee saw my pile of invitations after most of them had already gone through, thought, "HMMM looks a tad fishy there," whipped out a ruler, and gleaned that they were, in fact, 3/8 of an inch too long. Three-eights... of an inch.

Now again, I don't recommend anyone try what we did in response to this situation.

But, it worked.

I thought, I really don't want to add another stamp to these invitations that I paid money to order a pretty, custom stamp for. And I couldn't stop focusing on the fact that over half the invitations went through to our guests just fine. So over the course of the next day and a half (this was the weekend by this point), I split the remaining nineteen invitations into a few groups of 4-6 and went to different mailboxes around our area and dropped them in. Much less likely that way to grab the attention of a vindictive, I mean overzealous, postal employee who for some reason desires to halt their progress toward their loving recipients.

As I said, it worked. I now have confirmation that the invitations from every batch have made it to their destinations in Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Seattle, and beyond. And they did it without any ugly extra postage.

So may I say, HAHA, USPS, WE WIN.

(Foolhardy? Certainly. But I like to follow my instinct, and I lucked out!)

Does anyone else have stories of wrestling with USPS? Did you emerge victorious, or did they knock you down?

i love it! I enjoy the sneakiness and resourcefulness and i'm glad it worked out.

This is a great post! Lucky for me the guy that works at my local post office is SUPER friendly and when i sent my STD he looked for about 10 mins to find me stamps so they wouldnt need more then one stamp on them :)

I also have to add we have some really WEIRD NWR issues with the mail lady. She only delivers when she wants to. We dont get mail on wedns (trash day) and either fri or sat she wont come also. She also REFUSES to get out of her car, if we get a package she will use 100000 elastic bands and attatch it to the mailbox post just so she dont have to get ou!

Win for you!!  That is awesome! I love finding ways to beat the system!!

I feel kinda silly asking, but what could they have done if they had found out?  Just put them back on your doorstep again?  Or would have been like COPS with a whole team of people coming to arrest you for this terrible crime? ;)

But really... I am curious... what could have happened?

@piglet_625  Hah! Well, what we were worried about was that they'd get returned individually, with each one bearing an ugly "postage due" sticker, and would therefore be fairly ruined. The original batch we got back had a sticker like that on one of the invitations, but not on the others. To round out our fears, we're cutting it a bit close, with the wedding being less than six weeks away at this point and many guests living on the other side of the country, and the RSVP deadline is June 30. If we'd had the invitations returned again, it would have meant rushing to get them out again with more postage and giving guests little to no turnaround time.

@Vintage2010 @VeronicaH USPS can be so absurd! When I was living in Connecticut and FI was living in Seattle, one time I left my driver's license with him after visiting for a long weekend, and came home without it. He mailed it right away, but the mail carrier saw that he had addressed it to "Apartment 24" instead of "Apartment 2F" and sent it all the way back across the country instead of putting it on my building's mail table, which is constantly covered in letters and packages that are too large to fit in the individual mailboxes. What the hell?!

Ohhhh.... ok yeah I forgot they did that.  Stupid USPS.  I'm glad you won! :)

@lady206 You can find out info here: http://postcalc.usps.gov/

 If you click on the question-mark symbol next to "Letter" and "Large Envelope" you'll get a pop-up window that describes the size limit that our invitations violated.

Glad folks enjoyed our anecdote. :) Anyone else have stories of wrestling with the mighty Postal Empire?